Cormac Gordon: Girardi hopes blown call leads to instant replay

AP photoYankees manager Joe Girardi would like instant replay to help prevent umpiring mistakes like the one that cost his team Sunday.

Yes, it was a terrible call.

So much so, if there had been a real crowd at Yankee Stadium Sunday evening the booing of umpire Jeff Nelson might have been heard in St. George.

Tigers’ runner Omar Infante was absolutely and positively out trying to scramble back to second base on Austin Jackson’s single in the eighth inning.

“By, I would say, five feet,” Yankees second baseman Robbie Cano declared.

Cano’s assessment sounded about right, give or take.

The botched call, no doubt, was largely responsible for the Tigers adding to their lead in the eighth inning of Game 2 of the ALCS, a game the Tigers eventually won 3-0.

We’ll concede all that.

And we’ll even admit to more than a little sympathy for Yankees manager Joe Girardi.

His struggling team is now down 0-2 to the same club that sent them packing in last year’s postseason.

And they are staring directly at the challenge of facing Justin Verlander, perhaps the best pitcher in baseball, in Tuesday’s Game 3.

On the road, just to increase the degree of difficulty.

Girardi is in Peoria Monday to attend his father’s funeral, which is a personal blow that far overshadows current baseball matters.

If all that isn’t enough of a burden to bear, Girardi had the unhappy task of helping to carry his team captain, and New York baseball icon, Derek Jeter, off the field in Saturday’s excruciating 6-4, 12-inning loss in Game 1 of the series.

So these are difficult times, to be sure.

Given all that, any reasonable person could understand where Girardi was coming from in yesterday’s all but inevitable postgame discussion of instant replay for baseball.

He’s all for it.

And he built a convincing case in his post-game interview.

“It’s frustrating,” he began in the basement of Yankee Stadium. “In this day and age, when we have instant replay available to us, too much is at stake not to get it right.”

The former Northwestern University engineering student went on:

“They talk about the flow of the game, but we play 235 days to get to this point. We’ve evolved technology to make things better. That’s what our country has done. It’s an easy thing. It takes 30 seconds.

“This isn’t a game in April,” he said. “It’s best-of-seven.”

“Let’s have instant replay,” Girardi declared, “And not just for home runs, and fair or foul.”

It all sounded pretty simple, truth be told.

Put a camera here in this corner and another over there in that one.

Pretty soon you’d have everything covered, right?

No more muffed decisions on stolen bases, or balls hit down the foul lines.

We’re sending people into space like they’re hailing taxis in Times Square, after all, why not use some of that failsafe equipment to figure out whether the runner reaches the base before the ball?

And while we’re at all this improvement of the game, why not just order some gizmos to call balls and strikes? Do away with all that petty arguing over whether that fastball was on the black or that curve ball was just a little low, know what I mean?

If we get enough of this hi-tech stuff in place, and work out all the kinks, and have the right mix of computer programmers and engineers — and maybe a sports ethicists or two on call — we can probably do away with umpires entirely.

No more human error!

Wow, think of it.

Of course, I don’t know that would have helped the Yankees yesterday, considering the fact they went 4 of 31 against Tigers pitching, including three singles.

They did score zero runs, remember.

I can’t recall anyone ever winning a baseball game like that.

I’m not sure it would have done much good for the Bombers in Game 1, either.

Tigers’ manager Jim Leyland has a different take on things.

Leyland is OK with double-checking on possible foul balls.

And on home runs.

“When the ball gets to the outfield grass,” is his qualifier for any replay.

But the Detroit manager's notion of replay intervention ends there.

“I don’t want to make this a game where we are checking with somebody else all the time,” explained Leyland, who has been at this baseball stuff professionally since the first year of the LBJ administration. “I like the human element, to be honest with you.”